How ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ may give patients the wrong ideas about hospital care

It may be obvious to those working in hospitals—and especially in emergency medicine—that a TV medical drama isn’t quite reality. But for patients who are regular viewers of the long-running “Grey’s Anatomy,” the show could have a real-life impact on how satisfied they are with their care.

In a study published in The BMJ’s Trauma Surgery & Acute Care Open journal, researchers at Dignity Health’s St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix watched parts of 269 episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy,” skipping over the personal drama and focusing on how it portrayed 290 fictional trauma patients. They then compared those results to more than 4,800 real-life patients in the 2012 National Trauma Databank (NTBD).

Researchers even tried to match the geographical patient population by examining admissions to university-affiliated teaching hospitals with more than 400 beds in the Western U.S.—similar to those served by the show’s fictional Seattle Grace Hospital.

Unsurprisingly, significant differences existed between the TV and real patients. For example, many more of the TV patients died (22 percent versus 7 percent among the NTBD sample). While the study authors admitted it was hard to gauge how long some of the TV patients were in the fictional hospital, half of those patients who survived severe injuries made rapid recoveries and were discharged within a week, compared to 20 percent of the real-life patients.

This split between extremes in terms of outcomes—patients either dying or making quick recoveries—carried over to long-term care. Only 6 percent of surviving patients on “Grey’s Anatomy” were transferred to inpatient care. Among the real-life patients, 22 percent were discharged to a facility other than their home, making their road to recovery a much longer one than their fictional counterparts.

“Although realism is an integral element to the success of a television drama set in a contemporary workplace, be it a hospital or police department, the requirements for dramatic effect demand a focus on the exceptional rather than the mundane,” general surgery resident Rosemarie Serrone, MD, and her coauthors wrote.

Source: healthexec